Budd still a contender

At the age of 93, the writer of On the Waterfront - the story of a washed-up prize fighter taking on the Mob - is still punchy and forthright, and remains unapologetic for his actions during America's communist witch hunt

There are two lines from the twentieth century, one short and sharp, the other a little heavier, that perfectly describe the highs and lows of professional boxing, the power and the frailty of the human spirit. And, because of their simple poetic impact, both will live in the memory for as long as men are persuaded to fight for a living.

One was dreamt up and screamed at the world by Muhammad Ali - 'I am the greatest!' - and the other was written by a small, bookish man, shuffling along now, white-haired, coughing through his life-long stammer and as derisive at 93 as he was in his youth of all but life's most insistent burdens.

To get to Budd Schulberg, you have to go through Hicksville and Babylon. They are stations on the Long Island Rail Road from Penn Station to his home in the quiet hamlet of Quiogue on the edge of Westhampton, a chic little celebrity hideaway on the Atlantic coast two hours out of the Manhattan he loves. But Hicksville and Babylon could easily pass for metaphors in the fascinating life of one of the twentieth century's great literary survivors.

Schulberg has seen his share of small-town hicks and shysters, in and around boxing rings - and he has been a witness to the high life, too. There are few major names in showbusiness and American sport over the past 80 years that he has not met or known. He has much to reflect on and will do so again with his pen when he gets round to writing his autobiography.

Meanwhile, looking out over the quiet creek at the back of his comfortable bungalow, keeping a check on his medication and taking advice on all manner of things from his fourth wife, Betsy, Schulberg even now is planning his next adventure.

Recently, he received a phone call from London that would disturb what laughingly passes for his retirement in a most pleasant way. 'The director Steven Berkoff was on the phone a month or so ago and he wants to do it [in the UK in March].'

'It' just happens to be On the Waterfront, one of the landmark movies of our times, and which Berkoff fancies doing as a stage play in London. It is not a given that it will work - a musical version ran for just eight performances on Broadway in 1995 - but it is typical of Schulberg's innate pugnacity that he cannot wait to try.

Schulberg wrote the script that won the Oscar for On the Waterfront (1954) and gave Marlon Brando perhaps his finest hour-and-a-half on screen. Contained therein is the other quiet, beautiful description of boxing, and no doubt the one seared in Berkoff's consciousness.

It is worth recalling in full the words Schulberg put in the pouting mouth of Brando's Terry Molloy, the washed-up pug reduced to strong-arm work for his brother Charley, whom he berates in the back of a taxi one night.

'It wasn't him, Charley!' he tells him, pleading that the blame for his failed boxing career lay closer to home. 'It was you. You remember that night in the Garden, you came down to my dressing room and said, "Kid, this ain't your night. We're going for the price on Wilson." You remember that? "This ain't your night!" My night! I coulda taken Wilson apart! So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in the ball park - and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville... I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am...'

Where did he conjure that from, that one sentence - 'I coulda been a contender' - wrapped inside an angry rant? Interestingly, he did not think the words were that special when he wrote them. 'No. I don't think I did at the time. I really don't. I was so immersed in it. I don't think I stood back from it and thought that. I had hung around these guys an awful lot by this time and I'd sat up with them, drank with them at the bars, sat up with them in their cold-water flats. I really had taken a lot of time to know them. I picked up on their language. After a while I didn't have to stop and think about it. The words came to me naturally.'

Was it Brando's longest speech in the movie? 'I think it may be, yeah.'

Terry is largely inarticulate for the rest of the movie - in words at least - but he gets very emotional with Charley. You see boxers who have been hard done by and, often, they are unable to express it. Terry Molloy did that for them: there is a sense of powerlessness in that speech. 'Yes. I think so. It's all inside of them. They're angry, but they can't verbalise it.'

The movie - and Schulberg's part in it - was mired in controversy at the time, described by the Left as an unsubtle attack on the union movement, and Schulberg infamously was also caught up in the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into Communism in Hollywood. As a former party member, he was widely derided for naming names and wrecking the careers of former members and colleagues.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of his stance, Schulberg has consistently defended his actions in the 56 years since he appeared before the committee. As he saw it, he was hitting back at what he regarded as the attempted censorship by the party of his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run?

That 1941 book, ironically, put him on the outer in the film industry for many years, partly because John Wayne, whose clout was hardly negligible, considered it 'a Communist plot' as it advocated the formation of a writers' guild. Schulberg's father, the renowned Paramount studio boss of the 1930s, BP Schulberg, had himself fallen off the greasy pole. So Budd knew a thing or two about being ostracised by the time he made one of the great comebacks with On the Waterfront

He said once: 'I don't feel what some people expect me to feel. What's painful is to have believed in something that sounded so right, and that turned out the way the Soviet Union turned out. It's more the disillusionment that hurts for me.'

What is often forgotten is that, during his testimony to the HUAC in 1951, he defended many party members as 'idealistic' and 'innocents'. He made a case for them to be exonerated because 'they got into something that they really didn't understand'. But Senator Joe McCarthy - 'who wouldn't know Karl Marx from Groucho Marx', as one critic said - and his cohorts would not be swayed and a lot of those innocents were metaphorically slaughtered. Some of Schulberg's associates never forgave him for his part in the whole, sorry business.

Schulberg, although badly bruised by the experience in those most turbulent of times, soaked up the punches well enough. He saw On the Waterfront as a great vehicle, a story with which to expose the influence of the Mob on decent dock workers who had no alternative but to bow to their bullying - and a way back from the literary wilderness.

'I spent several years hanging around on the waterfront, working through that waterfront with Father John Corridan, [Karl Malden as Father Barry in the movie]. He was fascinating, one of the most fearless men I met. Ever. Holding meetings in the bottom of the church, very much the way you saw it in the movie, with the rebel longshoremen. He was acting, in a way, like a labour organiser. He was organising these men and guiding them in standing up to the waterfront racketeers, the men controlling the union, the ILA [the International Longshoremen's Association].

'The Mob really ran the damn thing. The ILA and the Mob were interchangeable. I based the movie very much on Local 824, which was called, for very good reason, the Pistol Local. These guys literally shot their way in. They just hijacked the union. And they ran it with a brutal, brutal hand.

'Once they controlled the hiring bosses, the guys who, just as you saw very much in the movie, picked them and said, "OK, you and you." There were kickbacks.'

Did he see, I wondered, a parallel here with boxing? 'Very true. That's the way it was. It was. It was. Total intimidation. Total. Every so often [fighters] were told, "This is not your night."'

After the success of the movie, Schulberg wrote the book version. He had picked himself up off the canvas. Yet, on balance, Schulberg has never been in love with the movie business and the people who run it. He characterises its problem as 'the tyranny of the box office'.

'What disillusioned me about Hollywood,' he says, 'was being a writer and identifying with the writers, I could see how the writers were at the bottom of the totem pole - they really were the worst treated of any of the main players. But even the most important director in the world can't really score if he doesn't have a good script to direct. It really does start on the page. It's about the words.'

The words are his weapons. The words and his courage. But, even in his triumph, there was acrimony. He had wanted Terry Molloy to die at the end of On the Waterfront, but the moguls would not have it - so in the book version that followed, Schulberg gets his way, finally, and his hero dies.

It was his single-minded take on realism. He thought death more heroic than winning a mere dockside brawl in a heart-rending screen finale. He will have the same argument with Berkoff in the months to come. Schulberg is determined to kill Molloy.

As is the way in the film industry, there was drama away from the set even before the cameras started to roll. The proposed killing of Terry Molloy brought Schulberg into conflict with one of the most powerful men in Hollywood.

'Well it was a big argument, I can tell you. On the last day of the movie, the very last day - in fact we shot the final scene on the last day - I was still saying I thought he should get killed. I thought it should end dramatically. Sam Spiegel, whose money was involved, I guess he thought it would be a disaster if we killed him. Elia Kazan [the director] was kind of in the middle, the way he often was with us. Very often the argument would be between Sam Spiegel and me. With 'Gadge' [Kazan's nickname] he was sort of the swing vote. I told him it would be very effective if he had that in, so that's why I did that in the book.'

In the end, as ever, money talked loudest and, in the movie, Molloy lived. What Schulberg also told me, though, was that Molloy might not have been Brando. The role should have gone to Frank Sinatra, whose career needed a fillip and who, coincidentally, was hanging around with just the sort of wise guys who would make Terry Molloy's life a misery in the film. He even came from Hoboken, New Jersey, where the movie was shot.

'It was complicated. We went after Marlon first and he turned it down. Then we went to Frankie and he loved the idea. It was perfect for him. Then Sam Spiegel - the thing to be a great producer is to be a great seducer - he wined Brando and dined him. Sam kept saying, "This is Brando's. Marlon should be doing it." Then somehow, by God, after we got poor Frank on board - they were even doing wardrobe on Frank - he brought Brando back in it again. Frank was infuriated. I can still hear him screaming at Spiegel. He sued in fact. They settled.'

For Schulberg, those were the days of greatest excitement. He had seen off the doubters. He had survived the trauma of the McCarthyite witch hunt. And he had written one of the great scripts. After On the Waterfront, Hollywood dipped into Schulberg's oeuvre again in 1956 and put his 1947 novel, The Harder They Fall, on the screen. It has been rated among the best boxing films of all time - in a genre that has created more than 500 films about the sport. In the pre-release version for selected critics, Humphrey Bogart, as the disillusioned writer, is seen typing, 'Boxing must be abolished in America.' Schulberg insisted - successfully - that this be changed to: 'The boxing business must rid itself of evil influence, even if it takes an act of Congress to do so.' Within five years, they were trying to do just that.

That attachment to the truth is characteristic of all his work. In a collection of his boxing prose stretching back more than 50 years - Ringside, A Treasury of Boxing Reportage (Ivan R Dee, available on Amazon) - Schulberg covers the waterfront with all the doggedness and honesty of his hero, Father Corridan, and he would value that achievement as highly as any Oscar.

He still gets to most of the big fights, accompanied by his son, Benn, and writes a regular column for a Scottish newspaper. The obvious question is: at 93, why?

'Well, I'd call it a very deep habit, really. I've been attending boxing matches since I was, maybe, 12 years old. My father was a big fan and, religiously, we went twice a week, Mondays downtown at the [Los Angeles] Olympic and Friday nights at the Hollywood Legion. So I fell in love with it that way - just the way Benn has.

'You can see why boxing appeals to so many, many writers: Conan Doyle and Bernard Shaw, up to Jack London and Hemingway and Nelson Algren and all the rest. The reason is a very simple one: boxing is the most dramatic, one-on-one of all sports, more than say... tennis would be, because I guess the sense of danger that's involved and the intense feeling of two men attacking [each other] - at their best, scientifically, but I guess, when you think of it in a hard way, they are really trying to overcome and even hurt each other.'

Schulberg is unusual among boxing writers inasmuch as he does not dwell on the merits of long-gone champions over those of current practitioners. In recent conversation with Bert Sugar, 'another one from the old-school', as he says, they agreed that Ricky Hatton might be the best British fighter in 20 years 'outside Lennox Lewis'. Along with nearly everyone else in the sport, they cannot wait for his match-up with Floyd Mayweather junior.

I had last seen Schulberg at a fight when Naseem Hamed had his thrilling up-and-downer with Kevin Kelley at Madison Square Garden 10 years ago. And, when the sycophants were salivating over The Prince's wild-eyed comeback, I remember him pointing out the deficiencies in the Sheffield featherweight's performance that would lead to his eventual undoing. As Hugh McIlvanney says in his foreword to Schulberg's book, 'Budd's has always been a clear-eyed passion.'